Blizzard revokes WoW enemy damage scaling

Fan feedback motivated this decision.

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Some World of Warcraft players were left pretty annoyed when Blizzard changed the enemy scaling in the game, meaning that they dealt more damage as time went on, but now the developer has acknowledged the issues with this, and changed it accordingly. This came after game director Ion Hazzikostas also said he knew there were issues with it.

"We're removing the increase to damage dealt by creatures in the world," Blizzard writes. "Our overall goal with this change is to keep the amount of time it takes to kill a creature from getting ridiculously short, and increasing the damage they deal is unnecessary for that goal. Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent."

"We're significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level. Again, all we're trying to do here is prevent cases where monsters die too quickly for players to react to their presence, particularly around World Quests. Our initial tuning was far more aggressive than it needed to be, which could make it feel like your upgrades weren't actually helping. This change will make it very clear that you are still becoming noticeably stronger than your enemies as your gear improves."

These two changes are live right now, and a separate issue where unequipping a item causes enemy power to alter has also been corrected. Blizzard also explained that they didn't say anything about the change because they "wanted to get testers' raw and honest feedback about it when they encountered it themselves, rather than attempting to pre-empt or otherwise influence their opinions ahead of time." It seems they got what they wanted, then.